Kusama’s eternal love, broken

Has the selfie struck again? Last Saturday, 25 February, the most recent of the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama’s infinity mirror room installations, All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins (2016), on display at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC for the artist’s retrospective (until 14 May), sustained minor damage from a visitor. One of around 60 acrylic yellow and black dotted pumpkins in the installation was broken. The incident was not spotted by the guards, since one to four visitors can spend 30 seconds in the room with the door closed, but a crash was reportedly heard by security staff, according to a museum visitor who spoke with the Washington Post. The room—one of six such installations in the retrospective—was closed after the incident and re-opened on Tuesday, 28 February. Because the work is site-specific, the Hirshhorn was able to reconfigure the display in consultation with Kusama, a museum spokeswoman tells The Art Newspaper over email, and the “integrity and experience of the installation as a whole remains intact while the individual element is undergoing conservation”.